Performance analysis of s-shaped helical horizontal axis wind turbine “SHAW”

This paper presents experimental and CFD investigations for the performance of a specially designed S-Shaped Helical Horizontal Axis Wind Turbine (SHAWT). The study was carried out for single blade (two buckets)& double blades (four buckets) turbines with three different twist angles; namely (90, 120 & 180 degrees). The turbines were fabricated from wood with 0.6m diameter, 0.7mlength and 2cm thickness. Experiments were performed using 0.64m2 wind tunnel cross section area at a constant wind speed of 8.5 m/sec. Experiments were performed to figure out the turbine performance for the several considered designs. Computational fluid dynamics model (CFD) was developed for the single blade 90 degree twist angle turbine to study the velocity and pressure contours. This aims at comparing the results with the obtained experimentally ones for the verification of the selected model. Several results were obtained for the selected designs. It was found that, within the tested range, the double blade turbine having a twisted angle of 120 degrees had the highest performance compared with the other configurations. The obtained Power Coefficient (Cp) was 0.12 at Tip Speed Ratio (TSR) of 0.52. All of the obtained results were compared with other investigators and a fair agreement was found.